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Dear Subscribers:

We apologize again for last week's technical problems. With this issue we're back on track, publishing Fridays.

Part 3 in our series about one school district's use of the Internet is a virtual visit to Linda Montag's 2nd grade class. It's the first time we've focused on how a teacher of some of the littlest students works with the Web, and we hope you'll learn as much as we did in interviewing Linda. Here's the complete lineup for these first few days of March:

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On kids and guns

In light of this week's tragic shooting of a six-year-old by a six-year-old classmate, we want to alert you to the particularly substantive Web resources that ConnectforKids.org has pulled together on "Kids and Guns". In this special edition of CFK's newsletter, you'll find President Clinton's call for an end to "the Congressional holdup of gun safety legislation" in WhiteHouse.gov and links to continuing news on gun violence, programs for reducing it, and information on taking action, state gun laws, and new research.

The Connect for Kids link we gave you above is good until March 13. After that, the issue will be in the site's newsletter archive and dated March 2 (look for the words "special report"). Let us know if you've found Web resources on this subject that have been particularly helpful to you - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

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Second-graders on the Web

Every school seems to have its Internet trailblazer - a teacher who sees the possibilities for incorporating the Web into the curriculum and helps make it a powerful tool for students and teachers throughout the school. Linda Montag, who's been teaching for 30 years, is the Net trailblazer at Madison Rose Lane, an increasingly inner-city K-4 school in the Phoenix, Ariz., area.

Many teachers, Linda told us, view the computer and/or the Internet as "one more thing" they have to add to the list of things they must teach, "rather than something that feeds into everything" they do in the classroom. That's the key to Linda's work at Rose Lane (the names along the left-hand margin of her home page are links to the other second-grade teachers' pages, which she created for them). In Linda's class of 23 second-graders and seven connected computers, technology is a tool that adds fun or variety to learning what the kids would learn anyway.

Linda's favorite tech tools are HyperStudio, KidPix, and the World Wide Web. She and her class use the first two to make collaborative slide shows about subjects they're studying. For example, while studying land forms, each child will take a word (canyon, plain, river, mountain, valley), draw a picture with KidPix to illustrate it, write what it means, put their work on a "slide," and together create a class "slide show" in HyperStudio. The result is like a child's version of a PowerPoint presentation, with every slide colorful and unique.

As for the Web, Linda told us it's a great tool for helping her kids work on their reading comprehension and learn how to do research. But she doesn't send a second-grader to Lycos.com or Google.com and tell him to do a search. That kind of Net research "is a challenge at the second-grade level," Linda told us. "If you're not really careful, they could get very frustrated. My Web Quests are teaching them how to find information on the Internet but in a directed way, showing them there's a lot of great information out there, but giving it to them in little pieces they can handle and handle well."

Linda's Arizona Web Quest shows what she means by "little pieces." She asks questions that the children can answer by clicking on a link above the questions and reading the material on the linked page. For example, she asks how long, wide, and deep the Grand Canyon is and links to the "Wonders of Arizona," a page for kids in Arizona Gov. Jane Hull's Web site. The material is presented in a way that's very readable to second-graders.

Web pages like that aren't always easy to find. "Sometimes I'll spend hours finding the kinds of sites second-graders can latch onto, that don't require a huge amount of reading," Linda told us. Other Web Quests she's created this year can be found on her "Mrs. Montag" home page.

Word about Mrs. Montag's Web Quests gets around. Sometimes the class does their research in the computer lab. One day after Linda put her Web Quest directions up on the board for her own class, she left them there. "A fourth-grade class came in and said, 'That looks neat.' They wanted to do the Quest, too," she told us. "So now I intentionally leave my directions up."

On Linda's page you'll also find Web Quests on Bats and Spiders (for last Halloween), Weather, and Johnny Appleseed. There's a link to the class's "penpals," including a third-grade class in Ennis, Ireland, with which Linda's class exchanges emails and shares local information on Web pages that classes in both countries build. Penpals is part of "Global Connections," a US Education Department-sponsored project in which the Madison School District is participating (see Part 2 of our series for more on this).

Teachers, a tip and a question for you: First, if you want to create Web Quests or a class Web page but don't know HTML the way Linda does, FamilyEducation.com's Teacher Vision site makes it easy for you (the Helpful Links Template can be used to create Web Quests). Here's TeacherVision.com's Class WebCreate page. Second, please send us your own stories about classroom Web use.

Parents, if you know a teacher whom you feel is doing a great job integrating the Net into his or her classroom work, please tell us about it. We welcome all comments.

Here are Parts 1 and 2 of this series.

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Web New Briefs

  1. Important case: A student, a Web site, a school

    In the case, a federal judge last week ordered a Seattle-area school district to temporarily refrain from punishing a student for publishing an unofficial Web site for his school, reports the New York Times. In his potentially precedent-setting ruling, Judge John Coughenour said Kentlake High School's five-day suspension of senior Nick Emmett (who has a 3.95 gpa and is co-captain of the school's basketball team) was likely to have violated the student's free-speech rights. Nick Emmett's site included mock obituaries of some of his peers. The Times pieces looks at legal precedent, the case's potential impact, and many perspectives, including those of the judge, Nick Emmett, school administrators, legal experts, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Excellent material for a powerful classroom (or dinner table) debate! If you have a debate, do email us about it.

  2. The Net: Home-school connection

    A new study offers a parent's perspective on something fifth-grade teacher Challis Ireland told us a couple of weeks ago. Challis said that being able to use the Web to give parents access to what's going on at school is one of the Net's biggest benefits to her as a teacher. The study found that 78% of parents surveyed said they'd become more involved with their children's school experience if they had greater access to teachers, curriculum, and event schedules via the Internet. The study was conducted by market researchers and LearningPays.com, a company that does "turnkey" network and technology solutions for schools. Here's a meaty New York Times article on how class and school Web sites are helping parents stay informed and engaged.

  3. How Americans feel about technology

    Don't miss National Public Radio's coverage of a survey it co-sponsored with the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Separate surveys of adults and children (10-17) show that Americans "love their computers and the Internet" and children even more so than adults. We found the findings on the digital divide interesting: The enthusiasm for computers and the Internet "runs wide and deep, across all incomes, all regions of the country, all races, all political ideologies, and most age groups. Of course, there are people who find themselves on the other side of the "digital divide" - especially those with lower incomes, less education, and over the age of 60…. Nevertheless, a surprisingly high proportion of poorer families now have computers, and many lower-income people do have access to the Internet from home. Only older Americans, as a group, seem out of the loop."

  4. Kids' email in trouble?

    The days of free email accounts for kids may be numbered. According to Wired News, new Federal Trade Commission rules for Internet companies that publish kids' Web sites may make it too complicated and expensive for the sites to offer kids email. Wired reports that NBCi, which owns Snap.com and Email.com, is "deleting" email service for children under 13. This, they say, may be the start of a trend. Would you be sad or glad if your kids no longer had their own email accounts - do email us.

  5. Cybersex and teens

    CNET ran an update this week on "Innocence in Danger," a United Nations project to combat pornography and pedophilia on the Internet. The story cites a recent survey at Seventeen.com in which 60% of the 10,800 teenage girls who responded to the online poll reported that they had engaged in what they called 'cybersex'; 15% of the teens who said they spend 10-12 hours a week online said they had met an online acquaintance offline; and 24% of the teens who said they're online at least 12 hours a week reported an in-person meeting with someone they had met online.

  6. Testing e-testing

    The New York Times reports on a study under way in Wellesley, Mass., public schools that's looking at whether computers should replace No. 2 pencils in the taking of standardized tests. What educators want to achieve is a "level playing field" for all students taking the tests. Past studies have shown that students used to writing on computers are at a disadvantage when given paper-and-pencil tests.

  7. More free ISPs

    It's clear now that free Internet access is all the rage among Web portals (what we all used to call "search engines"). Lycos.com and NBCi.com have joined the fray in offering this service CNET reports. CNET says that Disney's Go.com is the only portal that still doesn't have some kind of Internet access service, but Disney recently announced that Go.com was going to become a "niche" portal, focusing on entertainment.

  8. E-music site banned at colleges

    More and more colleges and universities are denying students' access to Napster.com, a very new e-music Web site that has already gained enormous popularity. A student protest group says 70 schools have now banned Napster (the schools say music downloads clog the network), the Associated Press reports (via the New York Times). ABCNEWS.com has a similar story. CNET focuses on Students Against University Censorship the protest group, which is circulating a petition that urges administrators to lift their bans. The petition reportedly already has 7,000 signatures on it.

  9. Dot-coms spawned in college

    Stay in college or start a company? Boston University has found a way to help students faced with that dilemma to do both. Wired News reports that last week B.U. launched a program called the Michael Bronner e-business Center and Hatchery, aimed at "making it easier for students to get funding for new businesses while continuing their academic studies." Benefactor Michael Bronner, founder of an Internet consulting firm called Digitas, dropped out of B.U. 20 years ago to start a coupon marketing business, Wired says.

  10. Library always open

    It took us a while to find the Reference page, but the site that Wired News calls a 24/7 virtual library does include the Funk & Wagnalls Multimedia Encyclopedia, the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, and an interactive world atlas. MyBytes.com is not just a research site, though, as the Wired story led us to believe. It's an ad-supported, all-purpose college student site, with - among many other things - free MP3s, job search, a health and beauty guide, and plenty of online shopping opportunities. If this does not appeal, tell us what research/homework helper sites you and your children have found useful.

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Surf Monkey: Bad news, good news

  1. One step back?

    Surf Monkey's well-intended efforts to comply with federal children's online-privacy rules hit a big snag this week. The news illustrated how tough it will be for kids Web publishers to bring their sites into compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act this spring. Wired News reports that a database error caused the company to send thousands of kids' email addresses to parents on its registration list. One of the company's kids' safeguards will protect those kids, though: Its CyberFriends email list, which parents compile when registering a child, locks email from anyone not on the list until the parents ok's it.

    The most interesting part of the Wired piece is on Page 2, where the writer describes a nonprofit central registry service now being put together. It aims to make giving permission convenient for parents and getting that parental permission easier for kids' Web sites.

  2. Donate while your shop

    The good Monkey news is the company's "Surf Safe, Support Your School" program: One chooses a school, shops in SurfMonkey.com, and a percentage of the purchase automatically goes to the school of choice. Surf Monkey's not the first Web business to do this, but we're pretty sure they're the first children's Web publisher/retailer to do so.

    In "Cash for classrooms" last fall, we wrote you about the dozen-or-so online-shopping sites that have this school-charity angle. The difference is, Surf Monkey's program is promoting online safety as well. "Surf Safe! Support Our School" is the message at the top of the banners and flyers Surf Monkey supplies schools and their fundraisers who participate. Of course the program also promotes SurfMonkey.com's online store, but advertising a safe Web service for kids is not an unreasonable way to raise money (once that database error gets fixed), especially if it's folded into any online-safety education program a school or PTA is promoting.

    We would love to hear from you about any constructive-use or online-safety education going on at your school. If you're involved in or know of Internet classes for parents or in-service programs for teachers, tell us how it's going.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Net Family News


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